Microsoft’s head of devices, Julie Larson-Green, has foretold of a future where there aren’t three versions of Windows. Most journalists are taking this to mean that Windows RT is at the end of its short and pitiful life. I think this is bigger than that, though: This is confirmation that all three of Microsoft’s operating systems are going to be killed off, replaced with a new, consolidated and unified OS that spans phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops.

Since the Xbox One was announced, Microsoft has consistently boasted about the power of the Azure-based Xbox Live Compute service launching alongside its new console. With these resources, developers can host multiplayer matches, offload tasks from the Xbox One’s CPU, and even crunch data while the console itself is turned off. There are clearly benefits to Microsoft’s push for cloud-assisted gaming, but there is a huge downside that has recently surfaced. As it turns out, the servers will need to be rebooted “rather frequently,” and this could potentially cause major issues for online-only games.

Over the past week, I’ve had the fortune to play with both Microsoft’s Surface 2 and the Asus T100 Transformer Book. These are very similar devices — convertible laptops with detachable keyboards — except for one big and fundamentally life-altering difference: Where the Surface 2 is powered by Nvidia’s ARM-based Tegra 4 SoC, the Transformer Book has Intel’s x86 Bay Trail under the hood. As a result, while the Surface 2 runs Windows RT, the T100 runs full Windows 8.1. Yes, every program and game that you use on your Windows desktop PC also works on the T100. Steam works on the T100. Team Fortress 2 works on the T100. Photoshop works (surprisingly well!) on the T100. Let that sink in for a moment, and then read on.

A mysterious barge has materialized near San Francisco, and naturally, has been generating a lot of speculation. Moored off of the Treasure Island pier, the massive barge is reported to be part of a new Google project to create floating data center. Other sources are saying that it is actually going to be some sort of a maritime office, or even a mobile store from which to peddle Google Glass.

Yesterday, Verizon announced that it’s building its own cloud computing platform to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Rather than designing its own hardware, or using readymade big iron setups from someone like IBM, Verizon instead opted for high-density SeaMicro servers. AMD, which acquired SeaMicro last year, has been touting this as a huge victory over Intel and its dominance in the server market. We can exclusively reveal, however, that more than three quarters of the SeaMicro servers purchased by Verizon are actually powered by the Intel Xeon E3, not AMD’s own Opteron chip. AMD has, rather ironically, become an Intel OEM.

In an effort to save both of its ailing platforms, Microsoft is planning to combine both the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 app stores into a single, all-encompassing app store. It isn’t entirely clear whether this will result in complete cross-platform compatibility for both Windows 8 and WP8 apps — like Apple’s iPhone and…

Microsoft recently released broken patches and updates as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday. Ordinarily, this would be small potatoes — except it’s the third month in a row that Microsoft has released major security fixes or features, then yanked them within hours or days. The problems at Microsoft run deeper than bad patches — even multiple bad patches in a row — and to date, nothing the company has done or said, including getting rid of Ballmer, has spoken to the underlying problem.

Samsung has announced that its “next smartphones” will also have “64-bit processing functionality.” This presumably means that the Galaxy S5, or perhaps the phone after that, will have a 64-bit SoC — and, perhaps more importantly, that Android will make the leap to 64-bit, too. Whether smartphones actually gain anything from 64-bit processing, or whether this is merely a 3D TV-like marketing ploy, is another question entirely.

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